


Soulmates for life or at least what's left of it

by mielipieli



Series: Birdflash [2]
Category: Titans (Comics)
Genre: Birdflash - Freeform, Gen, a bit cheesy maybe, but i managed a bit of angst too, this was on my laptop for ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 16:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13081179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mielipieli/pseuds/mielipieli
Summary: Dick never had a soulmate. Somehow, that seems to have changed.





	Soulmates for life or at least what's left of it

Dick never had a soulmate. He still believed in love. So much and so strongly. So he tried and tried to find someone who was right for him. With whom he could have a life as beautiful as his mama and papa. And it never, never worked out. The inside of his left wrist remained empty. Yet, he always hoped a name would appear. 

He dated Kory and everything was great. She was a lovely person and they were both in love. In the end everything still went up in flames. He messed up. She messed up. They both knew this relationship wasn’t working. At some point Dick realized that the love he felt for her was more platonic than romantic. His left wrist stung and Dick rubbed at it as if to free it from concealer covering up the soulmark. 

He dated Babs and the relationship always seemed like a burning trash can. A beautiful fire but an absolute mess all the same. It worked for a while. It did. They had been in sync for years when their relationship even began. The whole thing crashed and burned multiple times until they both agreed this had to stop. They were hurting each other and themselves and they would always remain family no matter what. There was a pigmentation problem on his left wrist and Dick hoped for a while.

He dated Clancy for a while, Helena, Cheyenne, Roy, Raya and Sonia. None of those worked out. He had fun in all of those relationships for a while and he never fit into the usual image of a player. He was always head over heels in love and trying to develop a serious relationship. It was like he was trying to find the right person and was just always not quite hitting the target. The only thing he always came back to was what everyone liked to joke about: the overwhelming majority of redheads. 

Dick met a weird guy a few weeks ago. He couldn’t get the meeting out of his head. The man had suddenly appeared before Dick and had wanted him to remember something. Dick hadn’t known what he had been talking about. How could he? He had never met the guy before in his life. So why did he feel like he had failed this man?

Dick angrily swung around the horizontal bar and held himself in a handstand. It was useless to think about this. He had tried to find anything on this guy but without a name it was difficult. Still, he had been wearing a suit obviously designed after Flash’s yet he couldn’t find a reference to anyone even remotely similar to this guy in any of their files.

There was a sharp burning pain in his wrist. Dick startled. A yelp escaped his throat and he lost his grip. He instinctively rolled on impact but all of the air was still pressed from his lungs. The pain in his wrist was stronger than anything else and Dick gripped it. He couldn’t form a clear thought. A face appeared above Dick and hands tried to pry his arms away from his body.

Dick only wanted to communicate that there was pain - pain - in his wrist. He tried to say something but the only thing that came out was a groan. 

Slowly a voice was getting through his haze: “Dick, come on… I need you to tell me what’s wrong.”

Dick wanted to answer but still he couldn’t do anything other than groan and hold onto his consciousness.

“Dick, you’re scaring me! Please, just tell me what’s wrong!”, the voice demanded and Dick’s brain was saying that that was Tim. “Bruce!”, Tim yelled.

Dick’s brain shorted out for a moment and when it turned back on there was a different face above him.

“Come on, chum. Let me see that.” This voice was calmer than the last. Bruce. “Just loosen your grip for a second. If you need to, you can grip my arm.”

Dick felt like he was regaining control. He nodded and let go of his own left arm. Another wave of pain rolled over Dick and had Bruce not held tight to his upper arm he would have ended up curled into a ball once more. 

“Be careful. You don’t want to hurt yourself more”, Bruce said.

Dick wanted to tell him that his wrist hadn’t been hurt in the fall. That that had been the cause. Instead Bruce gasped and moved a finger over Dick’s inner wrist. A wave of pain shot through Dick’s entire body and he flinched away. 

“Tim, I need you to get Alfred”, Bruce said and Tim nodded. Bruce turned back towards Dick: “I’m going to carry you to the medbay and give you something to knock you out alright?”

Dick nodded. The drug cocktail he got a minute later was a welcome reprieve. 

\-------------

When he woke back up, the pain in Dick’s wrist had faded into a distant sting. He slowly opened his eyes to see that he was apparently lying in the medbay. There were no machines or IVs connected to him, which meant that nothing was probably wrong with him. There was, however, a bandage around his wrist. No one was in the medbay to give him answers.

When he moved to sit up, Dick felt a sharp pain in his ribs. Goddamnit, he had probably hurt them during his fall. Carefully, he slid his legs over the edge of the bed and was immediately hit with a wave of vertigo. Dick closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. Slowly his balance came back. 

Dick stepped carefully to make sure he didn’t overlook an injury but he only seemed to have a few bruises from his fall. His ribs were also definitely only bruised, not broken. After making sure he was in a condition to move, he walked out of the medbay door and into the main room of the cave. 

“You feeling alright?”, Duke asked seemingly slightly uncomfortable. As far as Dick knew Duke still found it incredibly weird how often everyone got injured and how little all of them reacted to that. 

“Yeah, mostly”, Dick answered. “Do you know where Bruce is?”

“He went upstairs to work on some WE reports, I think. Should be in his office”, Duke said and then went back to looking at a folder on his lap. He was sitting comfortably in one of the beanbags. 

“What are you looking at?”

Duke grimaced: “Effects of poisons. I’m not even through the first category yet.”

“Well, have fun with that. I’m gonna go ask Bruce what the hell happened.”

“Good luck!”, Duke yelled after him and the sarcasm in his voice was precisely what Dick would expect from any other member of their family. 

\--------------

“I get that, Zatanna”, Dick stopped short of knocking when he heard Bruce’s voice, “What I want to know is whether you have ever heard of something like this.”

 

There was silence for a moment.

“Well, can you please ask around then?” Another short pause. “Thank you.”

Dick heard a sigh from the other side of the door. He decided it was now or never. He knocked.

“Come in!”, Bruce yelled.

Dick carefully opened the door: “Hey, Bruce…”

“You’re up”, Bruce stated and frowned at him. “How are you feeling?”

“Mostly alright. My ribs hurt a bit and my wrist is stinging. I didn’t hurt my wrist in the fall though. It began to hurt and caused me to lose my grip.”

Bruce sighed: “I thought so. You should probably take off the bandage.”

Bruce looked like he was incredibly worried how Dick was going to react. That was his ‘I’m scared of emotions’ face. Dick sat down on the couch and carefully began rolling off the bandage. A hot burning pain shot through his arm whenever he pressed down on his inner wrist. Bruce was watching him like a hawk leaning against the table. Then, finally, the last bit of bandage came off. Dick sucked in air.

On his inner wrist there was a name. A name written in a beautiful and incredibly messy cursive: Wally. Dick leaned towards his hand to look at it more closely. He carefully moved a finger across it and would have fallen on his face from the blinding pain if Bruce hadn’t rushed over to catch him. 

When Dick had gained the ability to breathe once more, he just continued to stare at it. This was what he had always dreamed of. A soulmate. Someone to share his life with. 

“Dick, are you alright?”, Bruce asked very insecurely. 

Dick looked up at him and opened his mouth to speak. Instead he just let out a sob. Tears began rolling down his face and without any hesitation Bruce wrapped him into an all encompassing hug.

\-------------------

It took nearly two weeks until his wrist stopped being overly sensitive. He hadn’t been out to patrol at all - Bruce’s paranoia - and had taken to spending a lot of time with his old-new friends. 

He was in his apartment with them when the red haired man showed up. He was a speedster. Well, Dick had known that before but now it was incredibly obvious. He wasn’t looking at Dick, though.

“Who are you?”, Dick asked calmly.

“Dick?”, red-haired guy asked sounding hopeful. Well, he had just broken into Dick’s apartment and that was definitely not alright.

“How do you know that name?”, Dick started to move for an attack. “I don’t know who you are. How did you get in here?”

The guy raised his hands: “Dick, slow down!” Honestly he could get him to explain what he was doing here after taking him down. “I’m not here to hurt…”

Dick moved his hand forward to grab him and was instead thrown back by something that felt like an incredibly strong taser. A wave of images that Dick couldn’t classify exploded in his head. 

“Did you just tase me?”, his outrage didn’t feel as aggressive as before. He felt more like when Tim decided to test a new gadget on him. “What the hell, Wally? What was…” Dick’s brain froze. “Wally?”

Was this… No… What… 

Before Dick could get any questions out, the other Titans ran through the door. They must have heard all of the noise. Dick only registered what was happening in the back of his mind. His whole body and brain felt frozen. Stuck with the revelation that this guy was Wally. Wally like the name on Dick’s wrist. The name he had found himself staring at for the last two weeks. The name he had made Bruce promise he wouldn’t tell anyone about until Dick was ready. 

Dick was grabbed from behind by Donna and pulled outside of the fighting. That shook Dick awake: “You guys need to stop!”, he yelled at Donna.

“Who is he?”, she asked but was gone again before Dick could answer because the weird tasing thing had hit Roy. 

Dick didn’t know what to do. He needed to stop them from fighting but there was too much chaos to control the situation. Especially since Lilith had declared that his mental signature had been changed a bit, the others would be convinced that Wally had done something if Dick stepped in. The whole story wasn’t very rational.

As it turned out he didn’t need to step in. It all happened by itself. And the entire time while everyone was excited about Wally’s return, Dick had no idea what to do.

\-------------------

“How are you doing?”, Donna asked sitting down on the edge of the rooftop next to Dick. 

“Too much is happening”, Dick said without turning his eyes away from the skyline. 

“I know”, Donna sighed.

“There’s the goddamn court of owls and my whole family is feeling like I’m abandoning them again but no one dares to say it. And then there’s the whole thing with you guys and while I’m really glad I have all of you, it’s also new and weird and just too much”, Dick whispered aggressively. 

“You never really liked change, did you? You like stability and harmony and nothing seems stable at the moment.”

“Exactly”, Dick agreed and Donna pulled him into an awkward little side hug.

“There’s something else”, Donna said. It was definitely not a question. 

“There is.”

“Are you going to force me to fly to my sister to get her lasso or will you just tell me like this?”

Dick laughed and wriggled out of the hug to lay down facing the skyline with his head in Donna’s lap.

“Dick!”, she yelled with concern.

“Are you serious? You can fly and I have decel cables and you’re worried about me falling off of a rooftop?”

Donna laughed: “It’s an instinct.” Then her tone got serious. “You’re distracting.”

“I am. It was working for a while, wasn’t it? You know how I never had a soulmark?”

“I do”, Donna said and combed through his hair with the hand she wasn’t leaning on. 

“Well, that kind of changed a few weeks ago.” He went silent to wait for a reaction. 

She looked at him with a raised eyebrow, telling him to go on.

“It says Wally”, he said trying not to betray any of his very confused emotions. 

“Oh, honey”, Donna sighed. “And you didn’t know any Wallys until today and now you don’t know what to do about it.”

“99 points for Donna”, Dick said, the sarcasm palpable in his voice. 

“Talk to him.”

Dick grunted in disagreement. 

“I know you have no ability to express your emotions but that is literally the only good option you have.”

“I could bury my emotions forever and never speak another word of it.”

Donna looked ready to just push him off of the rooftop.

“I won’t. I promise. I’ll figure this out.”

“Well, if you need more help, you know where I live.”

Dick snorted.

\--------------------  
“Dick, Donna, where were you?”, Wally yelled as they both climbed through different windows - well, Donna flew in but same difference. 

“Roof”, Dick said.

Roy grinned and spoke with a mocking english accent: “Gazing off into the sunset romantically.”

“Uh, gross”, Dick and Donna replied simultaneously and high-fived.

They all laughed. The incestuous nature of their group had always been a joke to them. Honestly, they managed to get along better for it. While they all had stayed children in some ways, they were also adults enough to acknowledge that sometimes relationships weren’t meant to be romantic. And somehow while they all had no problem imaging most combinations of team members in relationships, Donna and Dick - as well as Donna and Wally - had always been on the too weird list. 

“Movie or game?”, Donna asked and plopped down on the couch between Garh and Lilith - Dick nearly shouted in glee because they had spent two days together and already the sexual tension was unbearable for anyone else in the room. 

“Game”, Roy and Dick said simultaneously. 

“No cheating!”, Garth yelled immediately and his eyes darted between both of them.

Wally started giggling: “One time in my timeline we were playing cards and then Roy went to the toilet. He stood up and from everywhere cards started falling out. Garth flung the entire contents of all 52 full water bottles at him.”

“I wish I had a memory of doing that”, Garth said and got a wistful look on his face. 

\--------------------

Dick woke up in the middle of the next night from a nightmare. He’d dreamt of the Court of Owls and the bomb in Damian’s head. Of betraying his family and not knowing whether they’d come back home after last night’s parole. To summarize: He wasn’t feeling like falling asleep again. 

He walked to the kitchen in his pajama. He probably looked like a mess. His hair always attempted to defy gravity - one of the reasons he liked to keep it longer was the additional weight keeping it down - and both his t-shirt and his boxer shorts most definitely had stains on them from his breakfast a few days ago that didn’t manage it from the bowl into his mouth. 

Dick yawned. God, he yearned for a full night’s sleep. 

“Hey, Dick”, Wally said positively cheery.

“Why are you up?”, Dick asked incredulously.

“Couldn’t sleep. The speed force is going to take about three days to get to normal levels. It’s like an expanded caffeine high.”

“That… explains a lot.”

Wally grimaced: “Sorry if I was a bit too energetic yesterday.” 

Dick felt his heart ache: “No, no. I just had a bad dream and it’s made me grumpy. Don’t listen to a word grumpy me says. He’s mean.”

Wally laughed and Dick’s heart jumped off a cliff. It wasn’t like his giggles or loud laughter the evening before. It was quiet and endearing and Wally was shaking his head the entire time. Dick knew he’d heard that laugh a million times but at the same time he hadn’t and that just made the whole thing better. Because who doesn’t want to experience something familiar again for the first time. 

“Want some hot chocolate?”, Wally asked and it spoke for Dick’s distractedness that he hadn’t noticed Wally stirring a whole pot of cocoa before. 

“Sounds great.”

\-------------

They’d settled down on the couch a few minutes later. Wally was holding on to his cup like it was the only source of warmth in the entire world. He was sitting snuggled up in one of Dick’s sweatshirts and a pair of long sweat pants and a gigantic blanket and seemed incredibly content with the world. 

Dick raised an eyebrow at him and pointedly looked at his bare arms.

“Oh, come on! I’m not cold. I just like warm clothes!” Wally rolled his eyes. Then he focused on Dick’s left arm. “Where did you injure that?”

Dick grimaced. God, please let him not blush. “Training. It’s just a sprained wrist. I botched a routine on the horizontal bar.”

Wally looked very doubtful: “Is it the end of the world, yet?”

“Oh, no. That was seven years ago when Alexander Luthor tried to make the perfect world. And five years ago when Darkseid attacked. And three years ago when the Crime Syndicate attacked. And…”

“Touchè”, Wally raised his arms and laughed. 

“I may or may not have had a previous injury”, Dick admitted hoping he wasn’t giving too much away.

“Ha! Knew it!”, Wally announced loudly. 

A red head of hair appeared at the door of one of the guest rooms: “Just because you can’t sleep, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t want to!” The door was thrown shut.

“Ha. Knew it”, Wally whispered. 

Dick tried to suppress a laugh.

Wally watched him with a distant expression on his face: “Are you doing okay right now? I… I worry about you. You always try to do so much and from what I’ve heard the last few days you’re fighting the court of owls, joining the Titans, taking care of your family and just generally trying to do everything.”

Dick sighed: “There’s some things I don’t want to think about right now.”

“Like the actual reason you have a bandage on your wrist?”

Dick stared at Wally.

“Oh, come on. I’ve seen you fight with all kinds of injuries over the years. Your wrist is definitely not sprained. I’d go as far as to say it’s completely fine if it weren’t for the fact that you’re wearing a bandage, you’re rubbing your arm continuously”, Dick dropped his right arm like a bag of coke, “and that that’s the most common place for soulmarks.”

Dick decided he should just die right then and there. “It’s complicated.”

“Nothing is ever really complicated. That’s just stuff people say when something makes them uncomfortable.”

Dick combed through his hair with his hand: “I didn’t use to have a soulmark. It appeared about two weeks ago. Out of nowhere.” Dick waited for Wally to reach the obvious conclusion.

“Aaaaaaaaaaah…”, Wally said. Then he looked down and began to talk: “I… I assumed you had a different soulmate here. I assumed that… my mark was just a result of me being in the wrong timeline. It didn’t work out between us there… and at some point I think I just assumed the universe made a mistake. That it would correct it the next time around.”

Dick didn’t quite know what to say. He looked at the cushion in his lap. He had thought that Linda was probably Wally’s soulmate in the other world. It wasn’t even that uncommon for people to decide against their fate. To decide that maybe they should be with that person theoretically but that didn’t mean it would make them the happiest. He had most definitely not expected this.

He heard Wally take a deep breath: “If the universe is willing to try again, though, I could, too.”


End file.
